Monday, July 14, 2014

Creating a SharePoint Online site collection

After recently showing you how to delete a SharePoint Online site collection via the web console and PowerShell the next step is obviously to show you how to create a new site collection.

Via the Web console

Login to the Office 365 web console as an administrator. Then in the top right select the Admin menu option and SharePoint from the menu that appears.

This will take you to the SharePoint admin center as shown above. This will show you all the site collections you currently have. The SharePoint admin center is only available if you have a M or E plan. It is unfortunately not available if you have an Office 365 Small Business plan.

From the Ribbon Menu across the top of the page select New then Private Site Collection from the menu that appears.

This will open a new dialog window as shown above. Enter the following for your new site:

Title – What name will appear across the top of the home page.

Web Site Address – The URL suffix you want to use when navigating to the site. best practice is to keep this as short as possible and devoid of special characters.

Template Selection:

- Language - as required

- Select a template – select from the options available along the tabs across the top. In most cases you will simply select Team Site under the Collaboration tab but you can select whatever template you wish including ones you have created yourself previously.

Scroll down for more options.

Adjust the Time Zone and set the site collection Administrator. Next set the amount of storage (in MB) you wish the new site to have in Storage Quota as well as the Server Resource Quota value.

When complete, press the OK button to create the new site collection.

You should now see in the top right corner of the screen a message letting your know that the site is being created as shown above.

You should also see the URL of the new site collection appear in the list with a green spinning animation at the end indicating that it is current being created.

Once the creation process is complete you will see the NEW icon displayed next to the hyperlinked URL.

You should now be able to navigate to the URL of the site as the site collection administrator you configured earlier. Don’t forget you may need to configure other users access to this new site if required.

The PowerShell window will now pause until the site creation is complete. If you now look in the SharePoint admin center via the web console (refreshing the browser may be required), you should see the site being created as shown above.

After a few moments the site will be created as before and the PowerShell window will return to a prompt.

You can force the PowerShell script to return to the command prompt without waiting until the site collection is created by using the:

-nowait

at the end of the creation line.

So there are the two methods of creating a new SharePoint Online site collection in M and E plans using both the web console and PowerShell.